A lifestyle blog by Holly Sunderland.

Prepare to be Floored.

A long long time ago in a land far far away…just kidding. Last fall (which isn’t super long ago) at our house (which is actually right where I’m sitting) we decided to get crazy and rip out all our flooring on the main level of our house. We live in a rambler so it’s a decent amount of square footage to re-floor: about 900 square feet.

It was very obvious the carpet had to go, but we were thinking maybe the hardwoods could stay. I actually polled everyone on Instagram on whether to leave the hardwoods and just redo all the carpet and it was about fifty-fifty on ripping them all out or saving some of the existing floor. I am happy to report that half of you that voted were very wrong and replacing our flooring with one consistent floor throughout was one of the best decisions of my life. For reals.

Why did we decide to do this? First of all, the existing hardwoods were a color called butterscotch. I don’t know about you but I have never looked at a butterscotch candy or a bag of butterscotch chips and thought to myself, “this would look really good all over my floor.” Second of all, we couldn’t find more of the butterscotch floor to patch in even if we did like it. Lastly, the two floors in the small living, dining and kitchen space just made it feel even smaller and a bit awkward. Also, as you can see here, the carpet was gross.

We took out all the existing floors and then we realized the dining room and kitchen were a quarter inch higher than the rest of the subfloor in the living room and entry. After the added expense and extra time to install quarter inch board to the areas that needed it, we were ready to install our new floors! Side note: demo actually was awful because each individual board of hardwood was nail down in multiple spots. Clearly whoever installed it was living with a carefree “butterscotch forever!” kind of mantra.

We chose a 12 mm laminate with an attached pad from Lumber Liquidators called Sonoma French Oak. If you love it so much that you want to get your hands on some, I’m sorry, it doesn’t look like they sell it there anymore. Also, now you all know my long time secret that I ran out of wallpaper behind our couch. Whoops.

It took a good couple of weekends to get the whole main area floored and another day each for the two bedrooms that we also re-covered.

Literally can’t believe how much of a difference it makes to have one floor throughout the whole level. When I think about how awkward the whole carpet/hardwood separation was before, it makes me sad to think we put up with it for as long as we did.

I would say, if you’re buying a new house and you know you want to redo the floors, do it before you unpack. The hardest thing was moving all our stuff out of the way and downstairs to do the project and then putting it all back when we finished.

In addition to replacing the flooring, I also went ahead and replaced all the floor registers with more modern looking black ones. It’s a small thing but I think it also makes a big impact.

I also replaced all the baseboards to match the ones I put in downstairs when we did our basement refresh. Because why do one project when you can turn it into three, or four?

I love how they turned out so much! What do you think? Should we have kept the butterscotch? Let me know!

Hi!

I’m Holly! I love a good project, whether that be a small DIY or a large renovation. I created this blog to chronicle my home and that many projects we’ve undertaken to update it into this decade. I hope you find something here that inspires you to create in your own home. :)